3 most beloved captains in Toronto Maple Leafs history

The Toronto Maple Leafs have had over a century’s worth of captains. Some had their legacy cemented in this city and you can still hear their names spoken among fans like they just laced up and put in a killer performance last weekend. While others, well, didn’t have the best time wearing a letter in the Blue and White.

There’s always time to reflect on the negative but that’s not now. So, who are the three most beloved captains in Leafs history among fans? It’s a trio that we can feel extremely confident about.

Mats Sundin

While we might be very obviously exposing the exact time we fell in love with the sport, Mats Sundin was everything you sort of want to be in a captain in the modern era. Not boisterous or extremely outgoing, but just willing to keep the waters calm no matter how challenging the season got.

Sundin wore the “C” from 1997 to 2008, tied with Hap Day, the very first captain of the Maple Leafs, for the second-longest tenure in team history. Famously, Sundin was also the first European-born captain of the Maple Leafs and of course is the franchise’s all-time leading scorer, if he needed to add more to his resume and if we needed to explain why he is on the list.

The times Sundin had in Toronto might not have had the most glory, but there were at least positive memories of the team being good, not great.

Wendel Clark

Clark did not have a long tenure as the Leafs’ captain, spanning just three seasons from 1991 to 1994, but boy were they impactful.

The powerful winger led the Leafs to back-to-back conference finals and along the way emboldened his legacy as one of the more clutch performers in team history. He was fearless, the heart and soul of this team while he was here, and was almost every single Leafs fan’s favourite player on those teams.

Plus, even after taking off the letter and moving on, Clark would return to Toronto not just once, but twice, and has been an alumni mainstay in this city. It might have just been three seasons but there is no one in recent team history that fully embraced what it means to be a Leafs captain and still represent the hockey club long after you hang up the skates.

George Armstrong

We would be remiss if we did not include George Armstrong on this list. Not only was he the longest-serving captain in Leafs history, but he was the leader the last time this team had any glory whatsoever.

Armstrong led the Maple Leafs to four Stanley Cups – three consecutive championships in 1962, 1963, and 1964; and then the now-infamous 1967 Cup win – and was quickly enshrined in the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1975, just four years after he retired.

All the stories you read about his legacy during the Original Six era, give you an image of a very stoic leader that led by example rather than trying to force his way to any respect. Armstrong is arguably the greatest Leafs captain of all-time -- not even just for being the captain the last time this team won a Stanley Cup, but for the length of his tenure and clearly how he was able to run his team.

Could the current captain take the place of one of these names, one day? We'll see.